University of California to allow open access to new academic papers

On November 1, faculty will be automatically enrolled in the UC's open access policy.

The University of California—an enormous institution that encompasses 10 campuses and over 8,000 faculty members—introduced an Open Access Policy late last week. This policy grants the UC a license to its faculty's work by default, and requires them to provide the UC with copy of their peer-reviewed papers on the paper's publication date. The UC then posts the paper online to eScholarship, its open access publishing site, where the paper will be available to anyone, free of charge.

Making the open access license automatic for its faculty leverages the power of the institution—which publishes over 40,000 scholarly papers a year—against the power of publishers who would otherwise lock content behind a paywall. “It is much harder for individuals to negotiate these rights on an individual basis than to assert them collectively,” writes the UC. “By making a blanket policy, individual faculty benefit from membership in the policy-making group, without suffering negative consequences. Faculty retain both the individual right to determine the fate of their work, and the benefit of making a collective commitment to open access.”

Faculty members will be allowed to opt out of the scheme if necessary—if they have a prior contract with a journal, for example. Academic papers published in traditional journals before the enactment of this policy will not be made available on eScholarship at this time.

“As faculty members, we are asserting our control over the publication of scholarly research and recognize the responsibility for making that process sustainable and true to the intentions of scholars,” explained the UC on a FAQ page. “The faculty are also sending a strong collective message to publishers about the values and the system we would like in the future.”

The move comes at a time when the US federal government is heavily promoting open access. In February 2013, the White House announced that all science papers produced through federal funding would be made available to the public one year after their publication, and the Obama Administration is working to extend that policy to cover the information published by all federal agencies. Many other institutions have adopted open access policies, including 177 other universities and the World Bank.

As Chris Kelty, associate professor at the Department of Information Studies at UCLA, explained in a series of videos on the UC's eScholarship site: ”Everybody benefits from this really, the faculty benefit from this because their work's more widely available, it might come in for higher citations. The University benefits because the profile of the University is higher and it might send a message to Sacramento about our commitment to research. And the public benefits—whether you're a K-12 teacher, or someone in an emergency room looking for an article, or someone in business trying to get a patent, everyone in the public benefits from wider availability of our research.” In addition, Kelty explained, publishers “are quite reconciled to this” after seeing 177 other universities take a similar path.

This step is significantly beyond what the federal government has done. The primary reason is because it does not just apply to publically funded research. But the fact that PNAS still does not make its papers immediately available shows that the federal government is more of a follower than a leader. There is still some question about just how far the University of California policy does apply. Presumably, it does not apply to books. But, what about review articles that are not the primary publication of research results? In any case, the direction seems clear. Those who want their papers to be read and referred to are going to need to make them open access.

This article is only presenting one person's opinion. It would be interesting to know whether publishers are really resigned to this, or if that's an embellishment on Mr. Kelly's part. I'd be even more interested to know what scientists who publish a lot of papers think about this. It may indeed be that everybody is fine with this change. However, I'm not willing to take it at face value that everyone involved in publishing papers is fine with this when only one person's opinion is being referenced here.

This article is only presenting one person's opinion. It would be interesting to know whether publishers are really resigned to this, or if that's an embellishment on Mr. Kelly's part. I'd be even more interested to know what scientists who publish a lot of papers think about this. It may indeed be that everybody is fine with this change. However, I'm not willing to take it at face value that everyone involved in publishing papers is fine with this when only one person's opinion is being referenced here.

There are many different publishers and fields of science, so it would be foolish to bundle them all together.

In some disciplines, most obviously astronomy, physics and math, the transition happened years ago. If your paper is not available on arxiv it's probably garbage anyway, and no-one cares that it was published in some crappy $7000 a year Springer journal. Engineering and CS are heading the way of physics and math, but aren't there yet with the occasional valuable paper behind a paywall.

Then you get the holdouts like biology and medicine (what, you thought the Hypocratic Oath MEANT something compared to money? god you're stupid) for whom this is a whole new world. The claim in the past has been that everyone in biology seems under the delusion that their next paper is going to be the basis of some billion dollar patent, which is what has slowed things down --- I don't know how true that is. But if you want to see where the pushback will be, and whether things are changing, don't talk about "science", look at biology and medicine.

This article is only presenting one person's opinion. It would be interesting to know whether publishers are really resigned to this, or if that's an embellishment on Mr. Kelly's part. I'd be even more interested to know what scientists who publish a lot of papers think about this. It may indeed be that everybody is fine with this change. However, I'm not willing to take it at face value that everyone involved in publishing papers is fine with this when only one person's opinion is being referenced here.

There are many different publishers and fields of science, so it would be foolish to bundle them all together.

In some disciplines, most obviously astronomy, physics and math, the transition happened years ago. If your paper is not available on arxiv it's probably garbage anyway, and no-one cares that it was published in some crappy $7000 a year Springer journal. Engineering and CS are heading the way of physics and math, but aren't there yet with the occasional valuable paper behind a paywall.

Then you get the holdouts like biology and medicine (what, you thought the Hypocratic Oath MEANT something compared to money? god you're stupid) for whom this is a whole new world. The claim in the past has been that everyone in biology seems under the delusion that their next paper is going to be the basis of some billion dollar patent, which is what has slowed things down --- I don't know how true that is. But if you want to see where the pushback will be, and whether things are changing, don't talk about "science", look at biology and medicine.

Many of the humanities and liberal arts have peer-reviewed journals, too—though I don't know how much any of them have embraced the open-access philosophy.

http://nobel.universityofcalifornia.edu/The 59 UC Nobel Laureates might have somewhat higher research standards. Perhaps you should try doing a bit of research before you publish next time. Just having some basic common knowledge about places like UC Berkeley woild help too.

This article is only presenting one person's opinion. It would be interesting to know whether publishers are really resigned to this, or if that's an embellishment on Mr. Kelly's part. I'd be even more interested to know what scientists who publish a lot of papers think about this. It may indeed be that everybody is fine with this change. However, I'm not willing to take it at face value that everyone involved in publishing papers is fine with this when only one person's opinion is being referenced here.

There are many different publishers and fields of science, so it would be foolish to bundle them all together.

In some disciplines, most obviously astronomy, physics and math, the transition happened years ago. If your paper is not available on arxiv it's probably garbage anyway, and no-one cares that it was published in some crappy $7000 a year Springer journal. Engineering and CS are heading the way of physics and math, but aren't there yet with the occasional valuable paper behind a paywall.

Then you get the holdouts like biology and medicine (what, you thought the Hypocratic Oath MEANT something compared to money? god you're stupid) for whom this is a whole new world. The claim in the past has been that everyone in biology seems under the delusion that their next paper is going to be the basis of some billion dollar patent, which is what has slowed things down --- I don't know how true that is. But if you want to see where the pushback will be, and whether things are changing, don't talk about "science", look at biology and medicine.

Patentability has nothing to do with open vs closed access publishing. Your ideas are just as protectable either way. What it has to do with is the need (perceived or real) to publish in high impact journals to get a job (where it probably matters the most), get funding, or get a promotion. The big 3 (Cell, Science, and Nature) are all behind paywalls, and are all the sure fire way to get your application past the triage step. There are more options these days for respected open access publication, but not a lot. PLOS Biology and PLOS Genetics are the only journals approaching a decent impact factor that are open access that come to mind. And they don't have the cache to automatically get you noticed.

Edit: Also, it has nothing to do with money. No researcher makes money from publishing. You pay to publish, not the other way around.

This article is only presenting one person's opinion. It would be interesting to know whether publishers are really resigned to this, or if that's an embellishment on Mr. Kelly's part. I'd be even more interested to know what scientists who publish a lot of papers think about this. It may indeed be that everybody is fine with this change. However, I'm not willing to take it at face value that everyone involved in publishing papers is fine with this when only one person's opinion is being referenced here.

There are many different publishers and fields of science, so it would be foolish to bundle them all together.

In some disciplines, most obviously astronomy, physics and math, the transition happened years ago. If your paper is not available on arxiv it's probably garbage anyway, and no-one cares that it was published in some crappy $7000 a year Springer journal. Engineering and CS are heading the way of physics and math, but aren't there yet with the occasional valuable paper behind a paywall.

Then you get the holdouts like biology and medicine (what, you thought the Hypocratic Oath MEANT something compared to money? god you're stupid) for whom this is a whole new world. The claim in the past has been that everyone in biology seems under the delusion that their next paper is going to be the basis of some billion dollar patent, which is what has slowed things down --- I don't know how true that is. But if you want to see where the pushback will be, and whether things are changing, don't talk about "science", look at biology and medicine.

Patentability has nothing to do with open vs closed access publishing. Your ideas are just as protectable either way. What it has to do with is the need (perceived or real) to publish in high impact journals to get a job (where it probably matters the most), get funding, or get a promotion. The big 3 (Cell, Science, and Nature) are all behind paywalls, and are all the sure fire way to get your application past the triage step. There are more options these days for respected open access publication, but not a lot. PLOS Biology and PLOS Genetics are the only journals approaching a decent impact factor that are open access that come to mind. And they don't have the cache to automatically get you noticed.

Yup. Most profs would love to have all of their papers open access; as the article said, more potential readers of their own work, but also anyone in academia knows the frustration of needing a paper that the University hasn't subscribed to. However, they're also pragmatic. To get hired, or get tenure, or get a promotion, or get a grant, or etc, they need to publish more, and in higher tier journals. A single prof can't change that, it takes the community to shift it's position. That seems to have happened in Math/Physics, but not yet in other disciplines.

http://nobel.universityofcalifornia.edu/The 59 UC Nobel Laureates might have somewhat higher research standards. Perhaps you should try doing a bit of research before you publish next time. Just having some basic common knowledge about places like UC Berkeley woild help too.

So much for Californians being relaxed and easygoing.We have to make jokes about California, because the reality is too horrifying to face.

I, like many of my colleagues, am happy to send copies of my papers to anyone who sends me a polite email. Remember that abstracts are always freely available, and it's a trivial matter to obtain the corresponding authors details.

Also, many of the traditional 'subscription-only' journals offer an open access option ('Authors choice' in J. Biol. Chem. for example). Of course, this means that costs must be offset, typically in the order of one or two thousand dollars to publish, and this money is often not readily available.

I, like many of my colleagues, am happy to send copies of my papers to anyone who sends me a polite email. Remember that abstracts are always freely available, and it's a trivial matter to obtain the corresponding authors details.

Also, many of the traditional 'subscription-only' journals offer an open access option ('Authors choice' in J. Biol. Chem. for example). Of course, this means that costs must be offset, typically in the order of one or two thousand dollars to publish, and this money is often not readily available.

And yet that's an entirely unnecessary burden on you and the requester. Much easier for everybody if one of the options under "UC-eLinks" is "Download from eScholarship repository".

On the other hand, perhaps there should be another option that says "Request paper from corresponding author" to autogenerate these e-mail requests. Of course, once there are potentially hundreds or thousands of people requesting an article directly from you, it would be worthwhile to automatically respond to the request and send them the paper. If only some scientist had invented some kind of...transfer protocol that automatically 'serves' documents to people who send a request to 'get' it. Now that's an idea that could be huge!

The key thing here is that this is Green Open Access, in which neither the author nor the reader pays. Instead, UC pays for the servers that run this archive. The alternative, "Gold" Open Access, requires the authors to pay, and is as much a money-making machine as the pay wall based model.

For any biologists reading this: Nature and Science (I have no idea about Cell) already allow papers published in their journals to appear on the arxiv, so you can still publish in high-impact journals and have open access to your research. This does undermine the added value of a journal subscription, but I see that as a bonus: If private publishers like NPG, Elsevier, Kluwer, Springer, etc make profit margins in the double digits, it means research funding is diverted to shareholders instead of new research.

However, we do need some method of judging the quality of papers to help tenure and funding decisions, so we need to move to some sort of community-based paper ranking system. In the maths and physics community we are experimenting with various forms at the moment, and I think it is just a matter of time before a credible method emerges.

Finally, requesting copies from colleagues is no good if you are in the flow of research and you have to wait a day to get the paper, only to find out that this is not the paper you need. If you have ever done any research you know that this happens very often.

This step is significantly beyond what the federal government has done.

also i believe that UC has never tried to imprison someone under the computer fraud and abuse act for publishing details of icelandic parliament meetings or for 'leaking' the 1895 edition of 'the journal of phrenology'

This article by Megan is poorly written. It gives the impression that this policy will make papers openly accessible where before they would not have been, because of publisher rules. Megan writes,"Making the open access license automatic for its faculty leverages the power of the institution—which publishes over 40,000 scholarly papers a year—against the power of publishers who would otherwise lock content behind a paywall"

This is, at best, misleading. In fact a publisher (such as Nature Publishing Group for example) can still require that there is no public access to a paper for a given period, which can be of any length, and during that period the only way to read the paper will be by paying to pass the paywall. In fact, publishers can simply require that the author not put their paper on the UC system at all, ever.

This is not only, as Megan suggests, "if they have a prior contract with a journal" but rather this is ongoing and will apply to papers not even written yet -- UC does not want their researchers to suddenly be unable to publish in the various prestigious journals that won't play ball.

This is not to say that the UC initiative is not worthwhile. It is very progressive to establish that all papers will go online as the default option. However, in practice for many papers this will simply mean that authors need to do one more chore during the publication process: fill out the UC web form that specifies an embargo period or an opt out as required by the chosen publisher.

So while I applaud the UC initiative, I think a lot more change is still coming. We recently ran a conference all about these kind of issues, see the site www.rigourandopenness.org for the videos.

On the other hand, perhaps there should be another option that says "Request paper from corresponding author" to autogenerate these e-mail requests. Of course, once there are potentially hundreds or thousands of people requesting an article directly from you, it would be worthwhile to automatically respond to the request and send them the paper.

That's a nice idea, although overkill for most of us toiling away in obscurity (a hundred citations over a decade would be good going for an average publication).

To the commentator querying the pay to publish/pay to access model: it doesn't work quite like that (fortunately). There's usually no cost associated with publication in subscription-only journals, unless the journal has fees for colour figures. A lot of archive material is available for free too (papers more than five years old, for instance) as well as just-accepted, non-typeset manuscripts.

Limitations others here have pointed out notwithstanding, free and open access to knowledge is a valuable gift. Beaten only by access to clean water, food, shelter and healthcare it should be considered a basic human right.

Much though Wikipedia is derided, and it's not perfect, we live in an age where most people with internet access are able to find answers to almost all basic questions as well as a wealth of advanced knowledge for more curious minds.

Supposing there was total access to every academic paper around the world it would benefit all mankind. And it would not necessarily lead to the death of publishing as there's always value in and a market for well curated books on almost any subject.

I understand that if I prepare a manuscript that is accepted by, say, Biochemistry, I would be able to send a copy of the work to eScholarship for open distribution. My paper would simultaneously be available via the UC system, and also to subscribers to the journal Biochemistry. But what if I prepare a manuscript that is unlikely to be accepted to a major journal - or rejected outright by Biochemistry - does my work still flow seamlessly into eScholarship? My question is, I suppose, about peer review and citation credibility for the open-published work. Don't get me wrong, I'm fully in favor of bypassing the egregious charges levied by pompous academic publishing houses, but all manuscripts are not equal.

I understand that if I prepare a manuscript that is accepted by, say, Biochemistry, I would be able to send a copy of the work to eScholarship for open distribution. My paper would simultaneously be available via the UC system, and also to subscribers to the journal Biochemistry. But what if I prepare a manuscript that is unlikely to be accepted to a major journal - or rejected outright by Biochemistry - does my work still flow seamlessly into eScholarship? My question is, I suppose, about peer review and citation credibility for the open-published work. Don't get me wrong, I'm fully in favor of bypassing the egregious charges levied by pompous academic publishing houses, but all manuscripts are not equal.

The policy applies to peer-reviewed articles slated for publication. If your article hasn't been peer-reviewed, and accepted for publication, this policy does not apply. I haven't the faintest idea whether or not there are other ways to sneak a paper into the eScholarship system, because I only read the FAQ for this particular policy.

I think Open Access is long overdue, but I'm uncomfortable with the idea of forced licensing - particularly as the authors won't be paid for this appropriation of their intellectual property.

In academic publishing the authors don't get paid and the peer-reviewers don't get paid. Since the essence of peer-reviewed academic publishing is that a paper is written and then peer-reviewed, there is no logical reason (in an age where expensive print-distribution networks are no longer required) to add a 'Step 3: Charge $5000 for access to the paper'.